Touched down on Venice Marco Polo airport yesterday with a perfect view of the Floating City through the window. Though I directly drove on to nearby Vicenza, I hope to possibly have a short visit today before flying back.

Anyways, Vicenza has some beautiful 16th century architecture by Andrea Palladio as well and a wonderful but small Venetian restaurant with really delicious food and a very authentic talkative waiter.

I'm here with a handful of Swedes, and they considered several times the possibility to go viking and and steal some of the marble details for their wives at home...

thirtythr33 wrote:That sounds amazing. I've done some travelling before, but I've never had the chance to adventure around Europe, let alone somewhere as magical as Venice. I'm super jealous.

Don't be. It was a business trip, always in the presence of my customers. Swedes are super easy, but sure you have to be "official", so no adventuring really. We indeed had the chance to pay the Floating City a visit, but only in a speed boat as passersby. The city was awfully crowded due to the current movie festival, so we didn't dare to enter it on any of the official tourist routes. Anyways, we cruised many of the smaller canals and the Canale Grande, passed the cemetery island and Murano, the island with all the glas workshops...

thirtythr33 wrote:Since this thread got bumped, I'll give you all a short update on what I've been doing, preparing for this game.

Time skip 6-8 months, to the middle of winter (occasional snow in Venice and Mirandola)

I'm preparing a summary of the major events that have been going on around Italy in the meantime for the characters to know

Let me know if there's any particular things you want your characters to be doing in that timeframe

Since you all have really intense faith, philosophical and occult drives:

I've been delving deep into appropriate texts (eg, Othello, Name of the Rose, Divine Comedy)

Reading up on interesting major players of the time for inspiration (eg de Medici, Martin Luther, Marsilio Ficino, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa)

historical stuff like the Reformation and the Italian Wars and Landsknechts

The focus is moving away from Venice, instead centering on Miranldola and extending to Rome and possibly Switzerland and Germany.

Coming up with plot hooks and various ways to explore the themes of your characters drives.

Any particular requests or ideas from you guys?

Sounds great to me! Just a few ideas for Gregor:

Gregor is in search of a new faith or absolution for his sins from the old one. In the context of Giovanni Pico, I read about the Averroism. In this belief, the individual soul is non-existent (instead, all beings bear shards of God's own soul), which means that the individual soul can not be judged after death (no heaven or hell, Averroism comes close to Atheism for late medieval thinking). This would essentially solve Gregor's problem with his own soul, but might also make him an outlaw among both, Catholics and Protestants.

This would require Gregor to dig deeper into philosophy, which I assume possible in the service of Giovanni, but requires a slight re-design according to the new rules revision.

Though, then, some of his drives would need to be directed in new ways. These could be either directed more to the "German front" (like Gregor seeking to get rid of Gotthard in order to be free from the Kopfgeld / bounty) or more in favor of the interests of Giovanni or the rest of the group.

I super busy this week (I've even got some other S&S feedback and stuff I haven't gotten to write out yet), but after that I'll be hassling Agamemnon to see if he's going to be available to play in Act 3.

I've already pretty much figured out how we are going to kick it off and have a document somewhere with the bullet points of what has been going on in the intervening months.

Currently in the air just about to leave Black Sea and enter Romania coming back from Korea and India (if Higgins reads this: I‘ve asked my colleague and am sure she will provide some general vibe of what is said within next week at the latest).